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"The circumstances are of great delicacy, and every precaution has to be taken to quench what might grow to be an immense scandal and seriously compromise one of the reigning families of Europe. To speak plainly, the matter implicates the great House of Ormstein, hereditary kings of Bohemia."

"I was also aware of that," murmured Holmes, settling himself down in his armchair and closing his eyes.

Our visitor glanced with some apparent surprise at the languid, lounging figure of the man who had been no doubt depicted to him as the most incisive reasoner, and most energetic agent in Europe. Holmes slowly reopened his eyes, and looked impatiently at his gigantic client.

"If your Majesty would condescend to state your case," he remarked, "I should be better able to advise you."

The man sprang from his chair, and paced up and down the room in uncontrollable agitation. Then, with a gesture of desperation, he tore the mask from his face and hurled it upon the ground. "You are right," he cried, "I am the King. Why should I attempt to conceal it?"

"Why indeed?" murmured Holmes. "Your Majesty had not spoken before I was aware that I was addressing Wilhelm Gottsreich Sigismond von Ormstein, Grand Duke of Cassel-Felstein, and hereditary King of Bohemia."

​


-Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Modern Library Edition
New York, N.Y. 2002.




I've greatly enjoyed watching Jeremy Brett's filmed portrayal of the famous fictional consulting detective. Other than as a child reading one story ( "The Speckled Band" ) that appeared in a collection of detective stories, I had never read any of Arthur Conan Doyle's work.

I was extremely curious to see how faithfully the Granada-Jeremy Brett televised versions adhered to the original stories. Much to my delight and surprise, I discovered that the filmed versions are quite similar.

While the stories are entertaining, they are not the kind of stuff I normally read. In what may be a first, I declare that the film version (at least, of the Jeremy Brett variety) is better than the book!


 

...The holy city itself, stripped of the radiance of the Potala and the Jokhang Temple, appeared to the invaders as decrepit, medieval in aspect. In the streets hungry dogs lay abandoned as children in rags smoked wild rhubarb and tobacco. In the shops were bundles of scented soaps that had been on the shelves for decades. The people bathed once a year. They had prayer wheels but no wheeled transport. They called guns "fire arrows." They took it as a given that the world was flat. They allowed women to marry more than one man, and men to embrace in matrimony any number of women. Refusing to kill an insect or harm a blade of grass, they enforced the most ruthless of sanctions, the gouging of eyes, the severance of limbs for petty theft. In religious services, they played music with trumpets carved from human thighbones, and drank offerings from chalices made of human skulls...


...The chances of emerging unscathed were slim. Indeed, in 1914, the chances of any British boy aged thirteen through twenty-four surviving the war were one in three. Schools, on average, lost five years' worth of students. The student body at Eton numbered 1,100; in the war, 1,157 Old Etonians would perish. Wellington, a school of only 500, would sacrifice 699. Uppingham would lose 447, Winchester 500, Harrow 600, Marlborough 733, and Charterhouse 686. The Public Schools Club of London lost over 800 members, forcing it to close for lack of numbers. Of the thousands of public school boys who entered the war, one in five would perish. The lucky ones served on staff positions behind the line. Of those young officers who fought in the trenches, half would die...


...Anker's reservations are several. First, there is the matter of clothing and equipment. Mallory and Irvine had primitive crampons, but they could not use them at high elevations as the leather straps impaired their circulation and increased the risk of frostbite. On his summit climb Anker found crampons essential; he never removed them, even on the rock face of the Second Step...

​


-Wade Davis
Into The Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest
New York, N.Y. 2011.




Americans, by and large, remain absolutely and utterly oblivious to the unbelievable bloodletting that occurred in World War I.

The average U.S. citizen has no idea how many French, British, German, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, Austrian, Russian, Italian, South African, Ottoman, Belgian, Colonial and other troops were slaughtered in the insanity.

French deaths were 1,357,000 (with 4.3 million wounded). The death toll for the British Empire was 908,371 (with 2.0 million wounded). Russian deaths were 1,700,000 with 5 million wounded.

For comparison's sake, U.S. battle deaths in World War II were 292,100 with 371,822 wounded.

Wade Davis' book is going to appeal to anyone with an interest in climbing, the history of the Himalayan region and the Age of Exploration. It is thoroughly researched and well-written— though (obviously) far-ranging. It is possible to question the wisdom of the attempt to conjoin a survey of Britain's experience in World War I with a history of Everest. At 573 pages plus an annotated bibliography, it's not a book for an afternoon's diversion.






casualties
Verdun
WorldWarI
bloodletting
Somme
 
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At the risk of sounding rude Trysail do you really think that anyone is actually reading these self indulgent posts of yours?
 
"The fire was not very accurate. Inevitably there were numerous civilian casualties, shops were closed and all business suspended while the new president and his ministers discussed the alarming situation, and Congress warmly debated the ultimatum."

Richard Hough
The Great Dreadnaught
The Strange Story of the Mightiest Battleship of World War I
 
A Small Understatement

"Nonetheless, despite the efforts of the Vouglaisiens and the Rennains - not to be confused with the Rennois of the Rennes-les-Bains - the modern French nation has never really warmed to the Visigoths."

Norman Davies
Vanished Kingdoms
The Rise and Fall of States and Nations
 

...Three days later, he delivered the treatise on coinage that he had conceived before the war, chastising the minting practices that had sent the currrency into free fall.

"The worst mistake," he charged, "which is absolutely unbearable," is for the government to mint new coins— of inferior intrinsic worth, though pretending to equal value— while the old coins are allowed to remain in circulation. "The later coinage, always inferior in value to the earlier coinage, ... constantly depressed the market value of the previous coinage, and drove it out." **

Copernicus compared the infusion of inferior coinage to the sowing of bad seed by a stingy farmer. The government, like the farmer, would reap exactly what it sowed, he said, since its practices damaged the currency as surely as blight ruined grain.

"Such grave evils, then, beset Prussian money and, because of it, the whole country," he continued, "Its calamities and decline benefit only the goldsmiths, who take the value of the money into their own hands."

...Mint no new money in the interim, he further counseled, and above all set strict limits for the number of marks to be struck from a single pound of fine silver...


_______________
** Copernicus's realization that bad money drives good money out of circulation often goes by the name Gresham's Law, in honor of Sir Thomas Gresham (c. 1519-1579), a financial adviser to English royalty who made the same wise observation. The concept was also put forward by medieval philosopher Nicole Oresme and mentioned by the Ancient Greek playwright Aristophanes in his comedy The Frogs.


​


-Dava Sobel
A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos
New York, N.Y. 2011.



I'd previously read Dava Sobel's Longitude and Galileo's Daughter and enjoyed both. There's a certain elegant logic to the author's decision to write a biography of Copernicus on the heels of a work on Galileo.

From the passage above, it will be seen that Copernicus' talents were not limited to astronomy. He was, in fact, a bit of a polymath.

It's no particular surprise that Copernicus was well-educated and well-traveled. One can't help but wonder what drove his interest and willingness to make what are clearly voluminous and tedious astronomical observations. After all, it is obvious to anyone who looks that the sun circles the earth.


 


...It was the Hanseatic League that established a proper footing for commercial fishing in the North Atlantic. The popularity of the highly nutritious and economical cold-water fish prompted the Hansa merchants to order the construction of two fleets of vessels to exploit the massive shoals of fish in two distinct Atlantic fishing grounds: the so-called Scania waters off southern Sweden, where there were plenty of herring; and the Lofoten Islands, above the Arctic Circle in northern Norway, where there were unimaginably large stocks of Gadus morhua, the Atlantic cod.

The importance of this remarkable white-fleshed, protein-rich, almost fat-free fish in the Atlantic's history can hardly be gainsaid. It dominated the trade of the Hansa; it stimulated the transoceanic adventuring of the Basques; it provided hundreds of thousands of Britons with work and tens of millions of Britons with food; and for decades it formed the central plank of the economics of all of maritime Canada and the coastal states of New England.

Cod is a demersal fish, meaning that it likes to swim close to the seabed in shallowish waters— a fondness it shares with flatfish like sole, flounder, plaice, and halibut and with other fellow five-finned gadiforms like haddock, pollock, hake, and whiting. (The second broad division into which oceanic fish are divided is that of the pelagic types, which swim in the surface waters or the middle depths: the herring is a pelagic fish, as is the sardine, the anchovy, the mackerel, the infamous South African snoek*, and the currently endangered bluefin tuna). Cod was also once very numerous (Alexandre Dumas joked that the female was so fertile that if all cod eggs survived and hatched, within three years one could walk clear across the Atlantic by standing on the fishes' backs), until recent times most of the adult fish caught were large and muscular with dozens of pounds of white, motherly, nourishing flesh.

_______________
* Though popular in southern Africa, few Britons still care for it, as a consequence of the importation of millions of tons of canned Atlantic snoek during the Second World War and a highly ineffectual campaign by the then Ministry of Food to persuade people to eat it. It was found to be oily, bony, and bad, and despite entreaties for cooks to prepare such dishes as snoek piquante (when it was clearly piquante enough already, once the can was opened), most remained unsold. In the 1950s the sudden appearance on shelves of similarly sized containers of cat food suggested its eventual fate...


​


-Simon Winchester
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and A Vast Ocean of A Million Stories
New York, N.Y. 2010.



I've read a lot of Simon Winchester's oeuvre on subjects as diverse as madmen, dictionaries, volcanoes, geology, earthquakes and China. He has yet to disappoint.

Having said that, this is not his best work. That's not to say the book wasn't engaging; it's a good book to take along on a summer holiday. It's possible that so much of the material in this book is general knowledge that the element of discovery that marked his previous books is missing. After all, the world is not in desperate need of another account of Trafalgar or the great voyages of discovery. Sad to say, there were several instances where Winchester's prose fell apart. Who knows, perhaps the pressure of a deadline or some other press of time led to a number of awkward sentences that left me struggling to identify subject and verb? That certainly is not the Winchester I've come to know.


 
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In the true spirit of the original poster, page 28, tenth sentence.

"THis was after an early school night supper-it was not quite dark outside, but it soon would be.

John Irving;

In One Person
 


...The men of Milan were known for their singular reluctance to marry. "In Italy marryage is indeede a yoke, and that not easy, but so grevious, as brethren no where better agreeing, yet contend among themselves to be free from marryage." Distrust of matrimony was common enough in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, especially among the upper classes, to have provoked many such comments from visitors. Italian humanists, including Petrarch and Leonbattista Alberti, had railed against marriage as a distraction to the intellect and a potential cause of economic ruin. Nowhere was the misogynistic cult of celibacy stronger than in Lombardy. It did not necessarily entail sexual abstinence, merely a refusal to be yoked to any single woman. The rate of celibacy among Milanese aristocracy reached unprecedentedly high levels in the second half of the seventeenth century, so much so that it has been calculate that more than fifty percent of all high born males in the city had never married at all. Caravaggio would never marry either, although it is impossible to establish whether this was another example of the painter imitating aristocratic mores, or simply the result of his restless temperament...
​


-Andrew Graham-Dixon
Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane
New York, N.Y. 2010.




Surprisingly few people are familiar with Caravaggio though they would instantly recognize several of his paintings. He certainly lived a tumultuous life.

Graham-Dixon knows his man.


 
The amount of heat needed to raise an object's temperature by one degree depends on the circumstances, specifically, on whether you are also doing work on the object (and if so, how much).
 

...Starvation's not an uncommon fate in District 12. Who hasn't seen the victims? Older people who can't work. Children from a family with too many to feed. Those injured in the mines. Straggling through the streets. And one day, you come upon them sitting motionless against a wall or lying in the Meadow, you hear the wails from a house, and the Peacekeepers are called in to retrieve the body. Starvation is never the cause of death officially. It's always the flu, or exposure, or pneumonia. But that fools no one...
​


-Suzanne Collins
The Hunger Games
New York, N.Y. 2008.





Whilst stranded on an island and having finished the book I'd brought with me, a friend thrust this into my hands. Finding it necessary to distract my attention from the discomfort of the flight home, I polished the book off in three hours. It's pablum requiring serious, conscious suspension of disbelief. Don't bother.



 


...They didn't think in terms of right and wrong. All they cared about was keeping up appearances. The NCAA rules existed, in theory, to maintain the integrity of college athletics. These investigators were meant to act as a police department. In practice, they were more like the public relations wing of an inept fire department. They might not be the last people on earth to learn that some booster or coach had bribed some high school jock, but they usually weren't the first either. Some scandal would be exposed in a local newspaper and they would go chasing after it, in an attempt to minimize the embarrassment to the system. They didn't care how things were, only how they could be made to seem. A poor black football star inside the home of this rich white booster could be made to seem quite scandalous, and so here they were, bothering Michael. The lady said she was just trying to establish the facts of the case, but the facts didn't describe the case. If the Tuohys were Ole Miss boosters— and they most certainly were— they had violated the letter of every NCAA rule ever written...

...Not long after college coaches informed him that he had a future in the NFL, Michael informed Leigh Anne that, if he indeed made it to the NFL, he intended to buy a house with thirteen bedrooms so that his mother and siblings would be guarantied shelter. Now he wasn't so sure he wanted to do that. "They had the same chances I had," he said. "They need to get off their lazy asses and work. They need to start hearing 'no.' "
​


-Michael Lewis
The Blind Side: Evolution Of A Game
New York, N.Y. 2006.





What can I say? I needed a book to read on an airplane. I was curious. I like Michael Lewis' stuff.

The book confirmed my disgust with the hypocrisy and corruption of big time "Kolledge" football. He was a functional illiterate and the book is a catalogue of how to bend the rules and game the system in order to get him into "Kolledge." Make no mistake about it, Michael Oher was a professional athlete at age 16 because he was a "freak of nature." He had no business attending any self-respecting college. He should have gone straight to work in the NFL's minor leagues.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Oher



 

...The historical record on M.S. Hershey was far more complicated than either side in the sale debate wanted to acknowledge. He was not a miracle-working saint. He was profoundly amibitious, and more than a little egotistical. Both these qualities are required of any man who would build so much and acquire so much power...

...But while the opponents of the sale insisted that M.S. would never agree to sell his chocolate company to outsiders, in fact he had done just that. If not for the stock market crash of 1929, Hershey Chocolate would have become part of a larger, diversified food conglomerate. When you then recall that M.S. again flirted with selling out in the 1930s, it becomes clear that he was open to change and could imagine an end to the grand social experiment he had begun when he first bought land for his factory...



​


-Michael D'Antonio
Hershey: Milton S. Hershey's Extraordinary Life of Wealth, Empire, and Utopian Dreams
New York, N.Y. 2006.




Like so many of the great industrial entrepreneurs, several of Milton S. Hersey's businesses failed before one took off. Notwithstanding the carefully-cultivated image of benevolent paternalism and utopian success, he could be quite ruthless, arbitrary and capricious. The politicos of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have gravely damaged The Milton Hershey School and the company's shareholders by palcing restrictions on the company's transfer.





 

One person with clearly thought-through ideas about what to do was Vagit Alekperov. Born in Baku, he had worked in the offshore Azerbaijani oil industry until transferring at age twenty-nine to the new heartland of Soviet oil, West Siberia. There he came to the attention of Valery Graifer, then leading West Siberia to its maximum performance. Recognizing Alekperov's capabilities, Graifer promoted him to run one of the most important frontier regions in West Siberia. In 1990, Alekperov leapfrogged to Moscow, where he became deputy oil minister.

On trips to the West, Alekperov visited a number of petroleum companies. He saw dramatically different ways of operating an oil business. "It was a revelation," he said. "Here was a type of organization that was flexible and capable, a company that was tackling all the issues at the same time— exploration, production, and engineering— and everybody pursuing the common goal, and not each branch operating separately." He came back to Moscow convinced that the typical organization found in the rest of the world— vertically integrated companies with exploration and production, refining and marketing all in one company— was the way to organize a modern oil industry...

This restructuring would have been hard to do under any circumstances. It was very hard to do in the early and mid-1990s, when the state was very weak and law and order was in short supply. There was violence at every level, as Russian mafyias— gangs, scarily tattooed veterans of prison camps and petty criminals— ran protection rackets, stole crude oil and refined products, and sought to steal assets from local distribution terminals...

Meanwhile, following on Yeltsin's privatization decree, the Russian oil majors were beginning to take shape.

The most visible was LUKoil. Vagit Alekperov, equipped with a clear vision of an integrated oil company, set about building it as quickly as possible. The first thing was to pull together a host of disparate oil production organizations and refineries that had heretofore had no connection. He barnstormed around the country trying to persuade the managements of each organization to join this unfamilar entity called LUKoil. In order for LUKoil to come into existence, every single entity had to sign on. "The hardest thing was to convince the managers to unite their interests," said Alekperov. "There was chaos in the country, and we all had to survive, we had to pay wages, and keep the entities together. Without uniting, we would not be able to survive." They heard the message, all signed on, and LUKoil became a real company...

****​

At the military academy, he imbibed the careers of other ambitious young officers from modest circumstances— Ghaddaffi in Libya, Juan Velasco Alcarado in Peru— who had gone on to seize power.

It was in 1992... that Chavez and his co-conspirators launched their failed coup. In the subsequent two years that followed his arrest, Chavez spent his time in prison reading, writing, debating, imagining his victory, receiving a continuing stream of visitors who would be important to his cause— and basking in his new glory as a national celebrity...

​


-Daniel Yergin
The Quest: Energy, Security and The Remaking of The Modern World
New York, N.Y. 2011.





It's fascinating stuff. From its earliest days, the energy business has been a global activity full of bigger-than-life characters.

In a sequel to his 1991 Pulitzer Prize-winning, best-seller The Prize, Yergin details events of the last twenty years and describes some of the more recent heroes and villains.


 

...In the beginning there were three different colonial groups in Massachusetts. One group was aligned with those who eventually became revolutionaries. For lack of a better word, I will call these people "patriots." Another group remained faithful to the crown, and they appear herein as "loyalists." Those in the third and perhaps largest group were not sure where they stood. Part of what makes a revolution such a fascinating subject to study is the arrival of the moment when neutrality is no longer an option. Like it or not, a person has to choose.

It is not a simple case of picking right from wrong. Hindsight has shown that, contrary to what the patriots insisted, Britain had not launched a preconceived effort to enslave her colonies. Compared with other outposts of empire, the American colonists were exceedingly well off. It's been estimated that they were some of the most prosperous, least-taxed people in the Western world. And yet there was more to the patriot's overheated claims about oppression than the eighteenth century equivalent of a conspiracy theory. The hyperbole and hysteria that so mystified the loyalists had wellsprings that were both ancient and strikingly immediate. For patriots and loyalists, this was personal.

Because revolution gave birth to our nation, Americans have a tendency to exalt the concept of a popular uprising...

​


-Nathaniel Philbrick
Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution
New York, N.Y. 2013.




It's been said that history is written by the winners. That's probably the case for the American Revolution. There's little doubt in my mind that the original fomenters and agitators such as James Otis, Joseph Warren and Samuel Adams were probably implacable and unreasonable people, if not a little bit downright crazy.


Revolutions and civil wars are nasty shit. Many of these people were actually assholes. It's likely that two thirds of the colonists spent many days cursing the jerks who fucked up their lives and made life miserable.


The subsequent glorification and hagiography is as much fiction as the works of Stephen King.




 

...Neutral nations also thwarted the destruction of German industry. Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal, and Spain all carried on robust and profitable trade with Germany, to the ongoing frustration of the Allies. Almost 100 percent of Europe's wolframite, a tungsten ore critical to the manufacture of armored steel plate, came from the Iberian Peninsula. Half of Portugal's wolframite went to Germany, a trade policy that resulted in dead Britons. That was one reason Churchill for two years had considered the possibility of taking the Azores by force if Portugal's dictator, Dr. Antonio Salazar, did not agree to grant Allied ships and aircraft refueling rights in those islands. Were Allied aircraft allowed use of the Azores, the air cover over convoys would effectively double. Salazar continued to play both ends against the middle until late in 1943, when— after Churchill threatened to take the islands by force— he finally granted refueling and landing rights to the Allies. When Salazar objected to American troops being stationed in the Azores, Churchill again threatened direct action, cabling Eden, "There is no need for us to be apologetic in dealing with any of these neutrals who hope to get out of Armageddon with no trouble and a good profit."

The neutrals profited handsomely from their relations with Berlin. The Swedes supplied the Reich iron ore, canned fish, and ball bearings. The Swiss sold Hitler arms and ammunition, and industrial diamonds used in cutting tools and bomb fuses. Pressed in early 1943 by the British and Americans to curtail their arms trade with Germany, the Swiss promised to look at their trade practices, and then went on that year to increase shipments to Germany by over 50 percent. The Swedes were stubborn when pressed to limit trade with Germany, wrote Dean Acheson, then an assistant secretary in the State Department, but "the Swiss were the cube of stubbornness."

...An irony attached itself to dealings with neutral nations. The Allies considered German-occupied countries to be legitimate targets of economic and military warfare. The citizens of those nations were therefore doubly victimized— by the Nazis and by RAF bombs, which were no more accurate when dropped on Holland or Norway or France than when dropped on Germany. But neutrals such as Ireland, Portugal, Sweden, and Spain were immune from RAF bombs, immune from the bloodiest consequences of the war. Neutrals might be persuaded by diplomacy to adopt policies acceptable to the Allies, but they could not be cudgeled into good behavior. Meanwhile, they supplied skilled workers, raw materials, machine tools, and bullets that killed American and British soldiers, and banked the profits.

...If Allied bombers blew one of Hitler's munitions factories to smithereens, he could bank on the Swiss making up his loss, and the Swedes for the iron to smelt into new cannons...
​


-William Manchester and Paul Reid
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Defender of The Realm 1940-1965
New York, N.Y. 2012.






William Manchester (an acolyte and one of the earliest biographers of H. L. Mencken) had previously completed two volumes of his magnificent biography of Winston Churchill. He had completed research for the third, concluding volume and, by the mid-oughts, had partially written it when his health began to fail. In decline, he authorized Paul Reid to complete the book. Reid, a friend and admirer of Manchester, has done yeoman's work. The writing is seamless and fluid. Reid richly deserves the plaudits he has received for what he describes as a labor of love— his memorial to Manchester.


It is a massive book; the text alone is 1,053 pages (not including Reid's Author's Note, source notes, bibliography and index). It is rich in detail. Regardless of how much you know about World War II or how much reading you have done, I wager that you will learn something you didn't already know.


I've been chewing away at it, 20-25 pages a night, for a couple of months. It never fails to keep me returning for more.


In that vein— I've always been aware of Switzerland's shadowy and dodgy role in World War II but never was fully aware of Sweden's role in providing the Third Reich with war supplies.





 
"Participants go to the institute for periods of time ranging from one to five days so that a wide variety of in-depth personality assessments can take place."

Pg 28, Sentence 10

Larsen, R. J., Buss, D. M., Personality Psychology: Domains of Knowledge About Human Nature , Ed. 5th
 



...Suddenly Dunbar issued a raspy call to the men below, one so strange and unexpected that at first they could not register its significance. "Land ho!" he cried out. "Land ho! Off the starboard bow!"

It was just a vision in the distance, maybe fifty miles off, a nub of gray standing proud of the hummocks and pressure ridges. For several days, Captain De Long studied this curiosity, wondering if it might be an illusion— a refraction of light, perhaps, a fata morgana. He could not be sure what it was, for it was often obscured by mist and fog, and a low cloud clung to it. But a few days later, the cloud dissipated, and the island became visible to the naked eye: a tall conical mass, like a volcano, riven by gulches, its steep flanks speckled with snow. There was no denying it. This was land, the first they had seen in more than four hundred days— ever since they had lost sight of Wrangel in early 1880. De Long's relief was palpable: "There is something, then, besides ice in this world...

The Americans smoked and drank tea with the Chukchis, and were coaxed into participating in athletic contests: footraces, lance throwing, stone putting, and shouldering huge piles of driftwood logs. For all their strength and dexterity, the natives indicated they did not know how to swim. Wrote Irving Rosse, the surgeon on the Corwin, "They have the greatest aversion to water," though they were most adroit with their "little shuttle-shaped canoe, which is a kind of marine bicycle. The doctor noted that they were extremely kind to their children ("who do not show the same peevishness as seen in our nurseries"), and he seemed both intrigued and repulsed by the Chukchis' sexual promiscuity— "women are freely offered to strangers by way of hospitality, showing a decided preference for white men."
​


-Hampton Sides
In The Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the U.S.S. Jeanette
New York, N.Y. 2014.






I've read a couple of Hampton Sides' books and have yet to be disappointed. They're well-researched featuring subjects that have become forgotten or obscure through the passage of time. Sides' prose style is polished and readable. I've seen him interviewed; he's an interesting fellow and no dummy.





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...The groom of the stool, whose duties included attending the king when he relieved himself on his close stool or lavatory, was very influential because of his proximity to the royal person...
​


-Julia Fox
Jane Boleyn: The True Story of the Infamous Lady Rochford
New York, N.Y. 2007.​

​





Anybody who thinks feudalism is a thing of the past doesn't know much about H. sapiens. Court politics always was a deadly game. It still is.



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Well before the election call, Harper gave Mark Cameron, an advisor who had witnessed Liberal abuses close up. the assignment of creating one of the most far- reaching ethics-reform packages the country had ever seen.


Haperland; The Politics of Control.

Lawrence Martin; 2010
 

...There had been speculation for years about Johnson's relationship to that company [the "LBJ Company"]. Lady Bird had purchased one small radio station in 1943 for $17,500. Since then, thanks in part to a twenty-year-long string of strikingly favorable rulings by the Federal Communications Commission (which, among other aspects, had left Austin as one of the few metropolitan areas with only a single commercial television station), the company had burgeoned into a chain of immensely profitable radio and television stations the length of Texas, and by 1963 it owned as well 11,000 acres of ranchland and major shareholdings in nine Texas banks. Johnson had quieted the speculations by his unequivocal denials that there was any relationship. He had said, over and over, for twenty years, that the LBJ Company was entirely his wife's business and he had nothing to do with it; that, as he claimed in one of his many statements, "All that is owned by Mrs. Johnson....I don't have any interest in government-regulated industries and I never have had." But if Lyndon Johnson had no interest in the LBJ Company, why was it taking out insurance on his life? And, of course, his denials had omitted the salient fact. Texas was a community property state, and therefore since Lyndon Johnson had an interest— a half interest— in all the company's income, he had become rich. If Reynolds' statements became public, it would cast doubt on Johnson's claim that there was no connection between LBJ and the LBJ Company— and once that connection was established, the company's financial dealings would become a subject of journalistic inquiry. Johnson had arrived in Congress poor, and during his career had ostensibly had no source of income other than his government salary. He had been boasting to friends for years that he was a millionaire. By 1963, he, a man who had never held any job but his government positions— whose salary had never been more than $35,000 per year— was not merely a millionaire but a millionaire many times over...
​


-Robert A. Caro
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power
New York, N.Y. 2012.​

​





This excerpt is from the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro's monumental biography of the 36th President of the U.S.

I have read each volume as they have emerged. With each and every volume, I have been sickened and disgusted by Caro's revelations of Johnson's profound dishonesty.

The inescapable fact is that Lyndon Baines Johnson was a crook, a liar, a cheat, a thief and a blackmailer.

He cheated in every single election he ever entered— beginning as a student at obscure Southwest Texas State Teachers College— and he never stopped.




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..." 'Millionaire'— this was perhaps the first time that Johnson had ever been identified as such in print, at least in a national publication; he had perhaps never been identified in a national publication as a wealthy man, let alone a very wealthy man; for Life to do so, it must know something about his personal fortune that he had previously been able to keep hidden.

And, in fact, it did.

The magazine's investigative team had been working since the end of October [1963], and, during that time, say its leader, Associate Editor William Lambert, 'I began to pick up all these hints' about Lyndon Johnson, not merely about Johnson and his relationship with the newly rich Bobby Baker, but about Lyndon Johnson 'and the acquisition of his fortune.' Following up on hints, the team had found, in the words of Russell Sackett, one of its members and also an associate editor, that 'The deeper you got, the more serious they were; he was far richer than anyone had expected,' that he was, in fact, very rich indeed.

'I was very indignant,' Lambert said, and during the week of November 11 [1963], he had gone to the office of George P. Hunt, Life's managing editor, and said of Lyndon Johnson, 'This guy looks like a bandit to me.' Although 'bandit' is, of course, a synonym for 'robber' or 'thief,' Lambert didn't feel he was misusing the word. 'I felt that he had used public office to enhance his private wealth.' 'We're going to have to spend some money [to investigate]. I need some people, and a lot of time.' Johnson's entire financial picture should be looked into, he said. 'It was almost a net worth job, and you know that takes an enormous amount of time. I told Hunt, 'He's got a fortune, and he's been on the [public] payroll ever since he got out of college. And I don't know how he got it, but it's there.' By the time he went to see Hunt, Lambert was to recall, 'We knew he was a millionaire many times over."...​


-Robert A. Caro
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power
New York, N.Y. 2012.​

​





This is another excerpt from the fourth volume of Robert A. Caro's monumental biography of the 36th President of the U.S.

I have read each volume as they have emerged. With each and every volume, I have been more and more sickened and disgusted by Caro's revelations of Johnson's profound dishonesty.

The inescapable fact is that Lyndon Baines Johnson was a crook, a liar, a cheat, a thief and a blackmailer.

He cheated in every single election he ever entered— beginning as a student at obscure Southwest Texas State Teachers College— and he never stopped.




​
​
 


"...Pity the Presidents, for they enter the White House imagining that they have attained the height of power, only to discover a special kind of powerlessness. Lincoln famously said that events controlled him, not the other way around, but the public never believes it, which makes it even worse. Political considerations dilute each dose of policy; the need to balance priorities inhibits strong measures. The president finds himself trapped within the cabinet, his ability to act mediated by his secretaries. He loses touch with the world through the layers of bureaucracy surrounding him..."
​


-T. J. Stiles
Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America
New York, N.Y. 2015.​

​





I (among many) have a lifelong fascination with George Armstrong Custer. Unlike most of the books on Custer, Stiles' work focuses on Custer's early life, his brilliant Civil War career, the meteoric ascent that resulted, his largely bumbling Machiavellian proclivities, probable promiscuity, Reconstruction activities, failed entrepreneurial gambits, the Washita massacre, his ill-advised politicking and his self-defeating, stupid attempt to get rich by beating Wall Street at its own game.


The book is meticulously researched and well-written. It won a Pulitzer Prize.


Make no mistake about it: Custer was a stone-cold killer. He was ambitious, aggressive, courageous (or colossally stupid, depending on how you look at it) and, like it or not, a very capable military commander.


There were plenty of character flaws but military talent and competence were not among them; in the end, he was beaten by a skillfully-led, superior force— and it cost him his life.




​
​
 
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